In 1897, an American army officer named Charles Totten wrote “there are mysteries connected with the birth of this Republic.” Totten had been investigating the strange iconography of the Great Seal of the United States, and through his research became convinced that the birth of the American nation could be related to the vision of Francis Bacon’s The New Atlantis, who provided some financial support for the early Virginia colony. Totten’s remark is, surprisingly, somewhat of an understatement.
On the 18th September, 1793, President George Washington took part in a Masonic ceremony to officially mark the beginning of the construction of the Capitol in Washington, D.C. Wearing his own Masonic apron, the first President of the United States of America marched to the site with the members of a number of local Freemasonry lodges, and then descended into the construction pit which housed the cornerstone of the building. Washington placed a silver plate upon the cornerstone, and then made the standard Masonic ‘offerings’ of corn, wine and oil. The Masonic tools carried by Washington on this momentous day are still held at a lodge in the District of Columbia.
To many of us today, it seems strange that such an important day in the history of the United States of America would have such an overtly Masonic theme. What sort of importance did Freemasonry have in the founding of the United States? As it turns out, it seems to have been a highly significant factor.
In his bestselling book The Lost Symbol, Dan Brown has the character Peter Solomon noting that many of the Founding Fathers were also Deist and Utopian in their philosophy:
“My friends, don’t get me wrong, our forefathers were deeply religious men, but they were Deists—men who believed in God, but in a universal and open-minded way. The only religious ideal they put forth was religious freedom.” He pulled the microphone from the podium and strode out to the edge of the stage. “America’s forefathers had a vision of a spiritually enlightened Utopia, in which freedom of thought, education of the masses, and scientific advancement would replace the darkness of outdated religious superstition.”
In The Lost Symbol, Dan Brown touches on this relationship between Freemasonry, Deism, and Utopian thought, and how it influenced the Founding Fathers – but curiously, he does not go into much detail. So in this article, it might be fun to explore the impact these philosophies had on some of the Founding Fathers of the United States.
The Search for Utopia
The idea that the United States may have been founded as a ‘Masonic Republic’ is not a new one. We have already seen that Charles Totten considered it in 1897. The esoteric author Manly P. Hall also claims in his book, The Secret Destiny of America, that Sir Francis Bacon himself decided that the Utopian dream could be realized in North America.
In their book Talisman, authors Robert Bauval and Graham Hancock point out research by historian Ron Heisler which suggests another link between Utopian visions in Europe and the new colony in America. Heisler discovered that the German occultist – and staunch Rosicrucian – Michael Maier was in close contact with a number of individuals connected with the Virginia Company. This group of wealthy individuals had been granted a royal charter by James I in 1606, basically giving them unlimited power of government in the colony. This charter had been drafted by none other than…Francis Bacon. Heisler believes that Maier’s alchemical tract Atalanta Fugiens “may have been deeply inspired by the Utopian vision of America.”
American scholar Donald R. Dickson provides another link between the Utopian dreamers and the Virginian settlement in his book The Tessera of Antilia. Dickson’s investigations uncovered the existence of a Utopian society known as ‘Antilia’, which counted Rosicrucian instigator Valentin Andreae among its participants. Inspired by both the Rosicrucian tracts as well as Francis Bacon’s writings, this brotherhood at one point contemplated emigrating en masse to Virginia in order to found their Utopian society.
It is clear then that some Utopian thinkers in Europe saw the Virginia colony as an ideal location for a ‘new beginning’. In The Temple and the Lodge, Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh – incidentally, the authors whose surnames inspired the character ‘Leigh Teabing’ name in Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code – also mention that according to some traditions, a form of Freemasonry arrived in the New World two decades before Bacon even published The New Atlantis, and actively worked to promote the Utopian society dreamed of by Rosicrucian thinkers.
Enlightened Religion of the Supreme Architect
At the turn of the 17th century, a revolution of thought was underway. As Rosicrucian thinking led to the flowering of the Royal Society in England, more and more thinkers across Europe took to Sir Francis Bacon’s philosophy of basing knowledge on observation and experience. Isaac Newton stood at the crest of this new wave, and in the process discovered some of the fundamental laws of nature. And philosophers such as John Locke wrote tracts arguing that reasoned, scientific thinking, rather than faith in religious dogma, should be used in determining belief in a God.
From this burst of rationality, the school of religious thought known as Deism came forth. The core of Deist philosophy is that there is a God – or rather a ‘Supreme Architect’ – who created the Earth and human life, but that the Creator then withdrew from its creation to let it unfold without interference, as a watchmaker might construct and set in motion a watch, never to touch it again. As such, Deists did not generally believe in any of the miracles or supernatural events recounted in the Bible – instead, they saw God in the precise harmony of nature and its laws. In Thomas Paine’s words: “The word of God is the creation we behold.”
In France, the writings of the philosophes challenged traditional ideas of religion and government, and would make a deep impression on young minds in America during the 18th century – such as those of Franklin, Jefferson and Washington. Leading thinkers such as Voltaire and Diderot eviscerated organized religion not only for its irrational beliefs, but also for encouraging sectarian divisions and intolerance between opposing groups. Likewise, they challenged the tyranny of contemporary monarchies and governments, inflaming revolutionary feelings in both Europe and the Americas. There can hardly be any more succinct statement of the zeitgeist than the inflammatory words of Diderot: “Let us strangle the last king with the guts of the last priest!”
It can hardly be any surprise then that a number of the leading thinkers of the 18th century held common interests in Freemasonry, Utopianism and Deism. But in Freemasonry we find an additional thread of thought – the fascination with the ancient world and the idea that there was a ‘purer wisdom’ in those times which had been lost. This was a continuation of the ‘underground tradition’ that revered the wisdom of the ancients and which first arose during the occult revival of the early Renaissance and subsequent Rosicrucian Enlightenment.
In any case, the first documented Freemason to settle in the United States was a Scotsman by the name of John Skene. Initiated at a lodge in Aberdeen sometime before 1671, Skene settled in the New World in 1682, going on to become deputy governor of New Jersey. However, there are no records of a lodge in the United States prior to the formation of the Grand Lodge in London in 1717. What is interesting though, is that the first documented evidence referring to Freemasonry in America was printed in The Pennsylvania Gazette in 1730 – by one Benjamin Franklin.
Benjamin Franklin
Few people could claim to possess the talents of Dr Benjamin Franklin. A journalist and author, he published and wrote for his own newspaper, The Pennsylvania Gazette, during the first half of the 18th century. With a group of like-minded individuals, he also founded Pennsylvania’s first library in 1732 and devoted himself to the spread of knowledge and learning.
Franklin is also widely known for his scientific work and inventions, with his famous experiment of flying a kite during a storm (to demonstrate that lightning was a form of electricity) becoming part of popular folklore. To complement his reputation as one of the great scientists of the 18th century, he also invented two common devices still used today – the lightning rod and bifocal spectacles. He therefore stands firmly in the tradition of Newton and other members of the Royal Society, and his discoveries made a significant impact upon religious thought at the time.
In his book A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology, Andrew Dickson White says that Franklin’s research into lightning was a “death-blow” to religious theories about the influence of God upon the weather; “at the moment when he drew the electric spark from the cloud, the whole tremendous fabric of theological meteorology reared by the fathers, the popes, the mediaeval doctors, and the long line of great theologians, Catholic and Protestant, collapsed”:
The older Church, while clinging to the old theory, was finally obliged to confess the supremacy of Franklin’s theory practically; for his lightning-rod did what exorcisms, and holy water, and processions, and the Agnus Dei, and the ringing of church bells, and the rack, and the burning of witches, had failed to do. This was clearly seen, even by the poorest peasants in eastern France, when they observed that the grand spire of Strasburg Cathedral, which neither the sacredness of the place, nor the bells within it, nor the holy water and relics beneath it, could protect from frequent injuries by lightning, was once and for all protected by Franklin’s rod.
Franklin was also a diplomat and power-broker who was of profound importance to the founding of the United States. His role in discussions between England and the colonies on various matters began in the 1750s, making the suggestion of a union of the colonies as far back as 1754. In 1765, when the British Parliament passed the infamous Stamp Act (a tax levy on a wide variety of documents in the American colonies, which was a trigger for the separatist movement that led to the American Revolution), Franklin actively opposed it. In 1775 he was elected a member of the Continental Congress, and played a key role in the Declaration of Independence, despite his personal preference to remain affiliated with the British empire.
Franklin was posted as the new nation’s diplomat to France in 1776, and conducted his role with great success. He was instrumental in securing a military alliance with France, and negotiated the peace with Great Britain via the Treaty of Paris in 1783. He is the only Founding Father who is a signatory to the three foundation documents of the United States: the Declaration of Independence, the Treaty of Paris and the United States Constitution.
Benjamin Franklin was also a Freemason and a Deist, though it must be said that his Deism was of the ‘soft’ variety. For example, he wrote in the 1730s that God “sometimes interferes by His particular providence,” contrary to the Deist view that God withdrew from the world immediately after the creation, never to intervene. Nevertheless, he still pointed out some of the hypocrisies and false thinking that dogged orthodox religious views. “Sin is not hurtful because it is forbidden,” he wrote in 1739, “but it is forbidden because it is hurtful.” Similarly, he elegantly dismembered the religiosity of many people in saying that “serving God is doing good to man, but praying is thought an easier service and therefore is more generally chosen.”
Given the latter aphorism, it is not surprising that Franklin was attracted to the Brotherhood – the fraternity shared his dedication to fellowship, civil works and nonsectarian religious tolerance. He was initiated into Freemasonry in February 1731, and rose to the rank of Provincial Grand Master of Pennsylvania by 1734 (while still in his 20s), going on to become Provincial Grand Master of the colonies in 1749. As a publisher, he was in a unique position to aid the cause of Freemasonry in the New World. He published Anderson’s Book of Constitutions, the authoritative Masonic document, in 1734. In 1756 he had been inducted into the Royal Society in England, which we have seen was heavily Masonic and perhaps Rosicrucian in nature. And in 1778, while in France, he was initiated into the highly influential ‘Neuf Soeurs’ (‘Nine Sisters’) lodge in Paris, which would boast Voltaire, Lafayette, Court de Gebelin and numerous instigators of the French Revolution as members. He was also a friend of the Englishman Sir Francis Dashwood – founder of the Hellfire Club.
Franklin was involved in a ‘quasi-Masonic’ controversy in 1737, when a naïve apprentice named Daniel Rees who desired to join the Freemasons was killed as a consequence of a practical joke gone wrong. Walter Isaacson, in his excellent biography Benjamin Franklin: An American Life, recounts the sordid tale:
A gang of rowdy acquaintances, not Freemasons, sought to have sport with him and concocted a ritual filled with weird oaths, purgatives, and butt kissing. When they told Franklin of their prank, he laughed and asked for a copy of the fake oaths. A few days later, the hooligans enacted another ceremony, where the hapless Rees was accidentally burned to death by a bowl of flaming brandy. Franklin was not involved, but was called as a witness in the subsequent manslaughter trial.
Franklin’s publishing rivals gleefully pounced on the news that he was associated in some way with the controversy, and word of his involvement spread throughout the colonies. His parents were distressed at not only his link to this particular case, but to his membership of Freemasonry as well. In a letter to his father, Franklin sought to allay his mother’s fears about the Fraternity – while acknowledging that she had every right to dislike the Brotherhood on the basis of their exclusion of women. But, Franklin pleaded, “I must entreat her to suspend her judgement till she is better informed, unless she will believe me, when I assure her that they are in general a very harmless sort of people, and have no principles or practices that are inconsistent with religion and good manners.”
Moving from Benjamin Franklin’s rather mundane view of Freemasonry to something more exciting (if not a little speculative), we should note that Manly P. Hall, in The Secret Destiny of America, claims – with barely circumstantial evidence, it must be said – that Benjamin Franklin was part of the ‘Order of the Quest’, the secret movement to construct a Utopian democracy in the New World:
Men bound by a secret oath to labor in the cause of world democracy decided that in the American colonies they would plant the roots of a new way of life…Benjamin Franklin exercised an enormous psychological influence in Colonial politics as the appointed spokesman of the unknown philosophers; he did not make laws, but his words became law.
Given that Dan Brown is more than familiar with the books of Manly Hall (he is referenced twice in The Lost Symbol), it is surprising that he did not use this ‘Order of the Quest’ material in the new book – it seems tailor-made to a fiction novel concerning the secret history of America!
Franklin’s religious tolerance offers the ultimate reinforcement of the message of The Lost Symbol, and of Freemasonry – that all religions are ultimately one and we are a brotherhood of man. During his life, Franklin contributed to the construction budgets of every church in Philadelphia, as well as the one and only synagogue. Upon his death in 1790, almost 20,000 people observed his funeral procession, while at the front of the cortege marched “the clergymen of the city, all of them, of every faith.”
Benjamin Franklin had been a Freemason for almost fifty years by the time he signed the Declaration of Independence. What other Masonic influences can we find in the founding of the United States?
George Washington
As we have already noted above, George Washington was most definitely a Freemason. The commander-in-chief of the colonial armies during the American Revolutionary War was initiated into the lodge at Fredericksburg on the 4th of November 1752. Interestingly, he became an Entered Apprentice in the Craft before his 21st birthday, in contradiction of guidelines that initiations not occur until the applicant is “of mature age”. 
Some have explained away the anomaly based on his appearance – Washington was a huge man, standing 6 feet two inches in height. Perhaps the most likely explanation though was offered by Joseph Eggleston in his Masonic Life of Washington, who suggested that the change from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar – which had occurred just two months previous – had confused officials:
Many of his biographers state his birth as having occurred February 11, Old Style, 1731-2, and doubtless the record being 1731, no one even thought of counting up the elapsed time, but all assumed that he was over twenty-one.
In any case, Washington was ‘raised’ as a Master Mason only a year later. In 1777 he was offered the position of Grand Master of the planned Grand Lodge of the United States, but he declined (quite ironically) on the basis that he was not qualified for such a high office.
There is little doubt that Washington would have been more than capable of filling this position – his refusal to accept was based more on a genuine modesty which remained in evidence throughout his life. He refused to be paid for his military service, and left the room when John Adams recommended him for the position of commander-in-chief of the Continental Army. Despite accepting the post, Washington told the Continental Congress that he was unworthy of the honor. He was also reluctant to be seen using his power as President of the United States. Thomas Jefferson wrote of him:
The moderation and virtue of a single character probably prevented this Revolution from being closed, as most others have been, by a subversion of that liberty it was intended to establish.
In 1788, the year before becoming the first President of the United States, Washington did become Master of the Alexandria lodge in Washington, D.C., today known as the Alexandria Washington Lodge No. 22. The lodge became the site of the George Washington Masonic Memorial in 1932, a huge Masonic landmark modeled on the ancient Lighthouse of Alexandria in Egypt, the ‘Pharos’, which played a small cameo part in The Lost Symbol.
Despite attending church services with his wife, Washington held philosophical and religious views which suggest that he, like Franklin, was a Deist. As religious scholar David L. Holmes points out, “Washington was more concerned with morality and ethics than with adhering to the doctrines of a particular church. He seemed to have no interest in theology.” Washington would regularly leave services before communion, a habit which moved the Reverend Dr. James Abercrombie to compose a sermon scolding those in high positions for setting a bad example with their church attendance. Washington responded by ceasing to turn up at all – probably not exactly the response Reverend Abercrombie was looking for! In his speeches and letters, Washington rarely mentioned Christianity and Jesus Christ, and when referring to God often substituted the terms “Supreme Ruler of the Universe”, “Author of all Good”, and the Masonic “Grand Architect”. More plainly, when Reverend Abercrombie was asked about Washington’s religious views later in life, he simply replied: “Sir, Washington was a Deist.”
Washington died on December 14, 1799, with his friend and Masonic brother Dr. Elisha Dick in attendance. As he approached his final moments, Washington – who had a particular fear of false burial – had requested that his body not be put “into the vault in less than three days after I am dead.” And despite requests for his body to be interred in the crypt of the Capitol, and later at the Washington Monument, his wife Martha honored his request to lie in peace in the family crypt at Mount Vernon. Dr. Dick performed the Masonic funeral service which took place on December 18, with the brothers of Alexandria Lodge No. 22 in attendance. He placed Washington’s Masonic apron in the coffin, followed by a sprig of acacia, the Masonic symbol for immortality.
If all that seems a bit too mundane, perhaps you’d prefer the version recounted in Mason Locke Weems’ book A History of the Life and Death, Virtues and Exploits of General George Washington. Not afraid to dress things up a little, Weems told how the recently-departed, saintly spirit of George Washington ascended on angel’s wings…
…while voices more than human were warbling through the happy regions, and hymning the great procession towards the gates of heaven. His glorious coming was seen afar off; and myriads of mighty angels hastened forth, with golden harps, to welcome the honoured stranger.
While the prose may have been a vibrant purple color, it did echo the sentiments of the nation. To many, George Washington was a saint – to some even an American deity. Weems’ descriptive death scene was echoed in engravings by David Edwin in 1800, and John James Barralet in 1816, both under the title The Apotheosis of George Washington. These images reached their…er, apotheosis… with Constantino Brumidi’s famous fresco within the dome of the Capitol, completed in 1865 – now brought firmly into the eye of the general public through Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol.
Thomas Jefferson
All the available evidence suggests that Thomas Jefferson was not a Freemason, although he did agree with the philosophy of the Craft and was a confirmed Deist. He created his own personal Bible from the New Testament, by omitting supernatural sections and leaving only the philosophical teachings. This unique compilation became known as the ‘Jefferson Bible’ – in the early 1900s approximately 2500 copies were printed for the United States Congress.
While historians point out that there is no evidence to tie Thomas Jefferson officially to any Masonic organization, it is a matter of fact that he had great sympathy for the cause. In a letter to Bishop James Madison in 1800, Jefferson relayed his thoughts on Adam Weishaupt and his Illuminati (not to be confused with the fictional Illuminati of Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons). In what amounts to a defense of both Masonry and Weishaupt’s Illuminati, against the conspiracy charges laid by the writers Barruel and Robison, Jefferson’s allegiances clearly lie with the Utopian and Masonic ideals rather than Church and State. His words also echo one of the major themes of The Lost Symbol, that of each individual looking within and improving themselves:
[Weishaupt] is among those…who believe in the indefinite perfectibility of man. He thinks he may in time be rendered so perfect that he will be able to govern himself in every circumstance so as to injure none, to do all the good he can, to leave government no occasion to exercise their powers over him…Weishaupt believes that to promote this perfection of the human character was the object of Jesus Christ. That his intention was simply to reinstate natural religion, and by diffusing the light of his morality, to teach us to govern ourselves. His precepts are the love of god & love of our neighbor. And by teaching innocence of conduct, he expected to place men in their natural state of liberty and equality. He says, no one ever laid a surer foundation for liberty than our grand master, Jesus of Nazareth. He believes the Free Masons were originally possessed of the true principles and objects of Christianity, and have still preserved some of them by tradition, but much disfigured.
…As Weishaupt lived under the tyranny of a despot and priests, he knew that caution was necessary even in spreading information, and the principles of pure morality. He proposed therefore to lead the Free masons to adopt this object and to make the objects of their institution the diffusion of science & virtue…
This has given an air of mystery to his views, was the foundation of his banishment, the subversion of the Masonic order, and is the colour for the ravings against him of Robison, Barruel and Morse, whose real fears are that the craft would be endangered by the spreading of information, reason and natural morality among men…if Weishaupt had written here, where no secrecy is necessary in our endeavors to render men wise and virtuous, he would not have thought of any secret machinery for that purpose.
In his excellent book The Faiths of the Founding Fathers, David L. Holmes points out that Jefferson’s religious viewpoint could best be described as “restorationist”, and his description of this term is certainly in keeping with Dan Brown’s theme in The Lost Symbol:
In all fields, restorationists attempt to restore a lost set of truths. Christian restorationists believe in a golden era… from which the church has fallen away…Jefferson came to believe that the combined effect of power-hungry monarchs and corrupt ‘priests’ had despoiled the original, pristine teachings of Jesus.
Jefferson was the primary author of the Declaration of Independence, and as well as being the third President of the United States also served at various times as Vice-President, Secretary of State and ambassador to France. During his travels to France he accompanied his good friend Benjamin Franklin to the ‘Nine Sisters’ Masonic lodge, and many of his closest associates and confidantes were Freemasons.
Thomas Paine
Thomas Paine is yet another Founding Father who held strong Deist views. Born and bred in England, Paine didn’t move to the colonies until his late thirties, only a matter of years before the Declaration of Independence. He emigrated on the advice of Benjamin Franklin, whom he had met in London. Barely a year after arriving, he published the massively influential Common Sense on January 10th 1776, which is said to have sold more than 600,000 copies in a population of only three million. His words inspired George Washington to seek the route of independence from Great Britain, and Thomas Jefferson partly based the Declaration of Independence upon them. Paine also has the honor of being the person to suggest the name of the United States of America.
This revolutionary thinker was sentenced in absentia in Great Britain for sedition, and despite his support for the French Revolution in his Rights of Man, was imprisoned and sentenced to death by the revolutionaries for arguing against the execution of Louis XVI. Miraculously, he escaped the guillotine when the executioner marked his door incorrectly, finally gaining his freedom via the pleas of the new American Minister to France (and future President of the United States), James Monroe – who was also a Freemason.
Many Americans would be surprised to know that the man who coined the name of the United States, and had such a profound impact upon its independence, had strong feelings against Christianity. Unlike Franklin, who was exceptionally tolerant of religious views that differed from his own, Paine derided Christianity as “a fable, which, for absurdity and extravagance is not exceeded by any thing that is to be found in the mythology of the ancients.” In his Age of Reason Paine wrote:
The opinions I have advanced…are the effect of the most clear and long-established conviction that the Bible and the Testament are impositions upon the world, that the fall of man, the account of Jesus Christ being the Son of God, and of his dying to appease the wrath of God, and of salvation by that strange means, are all fabulous inventions, dishonorable to the wisdom and power of the Almighty; that the only true religion is Deism, by which I then meant, and mean now, the belief of one God, and an imitation of his moral character, or the practice of what are called moral virtues.49
Instead, Paine advocated Deism, declaring it superior to Christianity: “It believes in God, and there it rests,” Paine wrote. “It honours Reason as the choicest gift of God to man and the faculty by which he is enabled to contemplate the power, wisdom, and goodness of the Creator displayed in the creation.”
There is no direct evidence that Paine was a Freemason. However, after his death a posthumous essay was published, titled “The Origins of Freemasonry”. Whatever his official status was, Paine certainly seems to have had access to information about the Craft:
The Entered Apprentice knows but little more of Masonry than the use of signs and tokens, and certain steps and words by which Masons can recognize each other without being discovered by a person who is not a Mason. The Fellow Craft is not much better instructed in Masonry, than the Entered Apprentice. It is only in the Master Mason’s Lodge, that whatever knowledge remains of the origin of Masonry is preserved and concealed.
Paine was an equal opportunity debunker of myth though, and wasn’t afraid to point out what seemed to him to be a glaring error in the legend of Masonry:
The original institution of Masonry consisted in the foundation of the liberal arts and sciences, but more especially in Geometry, for at the building of the tower of Babel, the art and mystery of Masonry was first introduced, and from thence handed down by Euclid, a worthy and excellent mathematician of the Egyptians; and he communicated it to Hiram, the Master Mason concerned in building Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem.
Besides the absurdity of deriving Masonry from the building of Babel, where, according to the story, the confusion of languages prevented the builders understanding each other, and consequently of communicating any knowledge they had, there is a glaring contradiction in point of chronology in the account he gives.
Solomon’s Temple was built and dedicated 1004 years before the Christian era; and Euclid, as may be seen in the tables of chronology, lived 277 before the same era. It was therefore impossible that Euclid could communicate any thing to Hiram, since Euclid did not live till 700 years after the time of Hiram.
Paine believed that Masonry had a different origin than is stated in the myths of the Craft. He promoted his own view that Freemasonry was derived from the remnants of the Druidic religion, which was the most recent culture to bear a line of mystical knowledge which also passed through the hands of the Romans, Greeks, Egyptians and Chaldeans. And ultimately, according to Paine, Masonry was based on the worship of the heavens, and in particular, the Sun.
One of Paine’s friends, the revolutionist Nicolas de Bonneville – who also counted Benjamin Franklin as a friend – was even more explicit on the Egyptian origins of modern religions and movements. In his book De L’Esprit des Religion, published in 1791, de Bonneville claimed that Christian religion itself stemmed from the ancient cult of Isis. It has often been pointed out that statues of the Virgin Mary and baby Jesus bear a close resemblance to the Egyptian sculptures of Isis and the child Horus.
Paine claimed that the veil of secrecy which Masons worked under was in order to avoid persecution by the religion which took over the worship of the Sun – Christianity:
The natural source of secrecy is fear. When any new religion over-runs a former religion, the professors of the new become the persecutors of the old. We see this in all instances that history brings before us…when the Christian religion over-ran the religion of the Druids in Italy, ancient Gaul, Britain, and Ireland, the Druids became the subject of persecution. This would naturally and necessarily oblige such of them as remained attached to their original religion to meet in secret, and under the strongest injunctions of secrecy…from the remains of the religion of the Druids, thus preserved, arose the institution which, to avoid the name of Druid, took that of Mason, and practiced under this new name the rites and ceremonies of Druids.
Paine’s enmity against Christianity has meant that to a large extent, his role in the independence of the United States has been swept under the proverbial carpet (some ill-advised criticism of George Washington did not help his cause either). Theodore Roosevelt inaccurately called Paine “a dirty little atheist” (being a Deist, Paine did believe in a supreme being), and in 1925 Thomas Edison conceded that “if Paine had ceased his writings with The Rights of Man he would have been hailed today as one of the two or three outstanding figures of the Revolution…The Age of Reason cost him glory at the hands of his countrymen.”
Alexander Hamilton
Alexander Hamilton was certainly not blessed with an easy start in life. He was born in the West Indies as the illegitimate son of a struggling businessman from Scotland, James Hamilton, and Rachel Fawcett Lavien – who was at the time married to another man. His father abandoned him, and his mother died in his early teens. However, his precocious intellect and raw ambition paved the way for a meteoric rise: by the end of his teenage years, Hamilton was General George Washington’s most trusted aide-de-camp, and a published pamphleteer of renown on the subjects of government and economics.
President George Washington appointed Hamilton as the United States’ first Secretary of the Treasury, a post in which he served from 1789 until 1795. His tenure marked him as one of America’s most important statesman, with some saying his financial and political genius paved the way for the United States to become the super-power it is today.
Despite his modest beginnings, Hamilton had a strong belief that only a ‘chosen few’ were fit to govern and that power should be centralized, once saying “ancient democracies in which the people themselves deliberated never possessed one good feature of government.” His vision of the U.S. was for power to be taken away from the states and put in the hands of a central government. This clashed with the ideals of Thomas Jefferson, and the two were often at odds over the governing of the fledgling nation. Jefferson – known for his political paranoia – became convinced that Hamilton led a “corrupt squadron” who would destroy the good work done in creating the U.S. Constitution, by getting rid of the limitations it imposed on the government. Jefferson feared that Hamilton’s vision would bring about “a change, from the present republican form of government, to that of a monarchy” – exactly the type of government that Utopians were desperate to free themselves from.
Hamilton also instigated the creation of the first national bank of the United States, once again meeting intense opposition from Jefferson, who was at the time the Secretary of State. One of Hamilton’s more infamous quotes gives support to Jefferson’s concerns about Hamilton’s version of democracy:
All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are the rich and the well-born; the other the mass of the people…turbulent and changing, they seldom judge or determine right. Give therefore to the first class a distinct, permanent share in the Government. Nothing but a permanent body can check the imprudence of democracy.
There is some confusion as to whether Hamilton was a Freemason. 33rd Degree Mason Henry Clausen claims Hamilton as a ‘Brother’ in his book Masons Who Helped Shape Our Nation, as does Gordon S. Wood in The Radicalism of the American Revolution. However, Masonic scholar Allen E. Roberts specifically states that Hamilton was not a Mason in his respected tome, Freemasonry in American History.
Hamilton’s life came to a bizarre end on July 12, 1804. It is alleged that he privately made comments questioning the integrity of the third Vice-President of the United States, Aaron Burr – although this incident was more the final straw in a long-simmering antipathy between the two, with Hamilton previously causing serious injury to Burr’s chances of becoming President. Burr demanded an apology for Hamilton’s slight, but Hamilton refused – saying he could not recall making any such remarks. A duel was set to resolve the issue, with Burr and Hamilton coming together on a rocky ledge in Weehawken, New Jersey – the same place where Hamilton’s son Phillip had been killed in a duel just three years previous. Burr shot and mortally wounded Hamilton, who died the next day.
Masons Everywhere
We have seen that a number of the Founding Fathers of the United States were ambivalent, if not downright hostile, towards Christianity. A strong thread of Deism runs through the ranks of the influential personalities involved in America’s independence. But stronger still is the presence of Freemasonry. Not only were many of the Founding Fathers initiates of the Craft, but also numerous generals in the Continental Army, as well as other individuals who loom large in the drive for independence, such as the Frenchman Gilbert Lafayette.
This young idealistic French aristocrat took the position of Major-General in the Continental Army, with the request that he not be paid for his service, at the grand age of 19. His exemplary service for the fledgling United States earned him the respect of George Washington, whom he thereafter held as a life-long friend. Lafayette also spent time with Benjamin Franklin in Paris, where they were both members of the ‘Nine Sisters’ Masonic lodge – in fact, each supported an arm of the aged philosophe Voltaire as he was inducted into the influential organization. Lafayette’s prominence in the Revolutionary War has led to approximately four hundred public places and streets in the United States being named after him. It is said that when American troops liberated Paris in the First World War, Colonel C. E. Stanton – on behalf of the U.S. General John Perching, a 33rd Degree Freemason – stood before Lafayette’s tomb on the 4th of July 1917, proclaiming “Lafayette, we are here!”
One of the legendary moments in the move towards independence was the ‘Boston Tea Party’. On the night of the 16th of December 1773, a group of Boston locals protesting the importation of duty-free tea from the East India Tea Company, boarded the merchant ship Dartmouth and dumped its entire cargo of tea into the harbor. While devoid of bloodshed, this incident marked the beginning of the Revolution, as it ignited colonial passions against the strictures and impositions of the parliament of Great Britain. What is unknown to many is that at least twelve members of the local Masonic lodge were involved in the Boston Tea Party – including the patriot Paul Revere – and at least another twelve of the participants subsequently joined it.
Another influential contributor to the drive for independence was a Jewish Freemason named Haym Solomon, who had amassed a fortune through his dealings as a banker and merchant. Solomon had a deep belief that the United States would go on to become a beacon of the world, and as such devoted not only his own fortune to the revolutionary cause, but also played a huge role in raising money from international sources – helped by his proficiency in eight languages.
Haym Solomon negotiated war aid from France and Holland, and acted as paymaster-general of the French military forces during the Revolutionary War. He is said to have loaned the fledgling government about $600,000, of which at least $400,000 was never repaid. He also financially assisted icons such as Jefferson and Madison, and was a close personal friend of George Washington.
The list could go on. Benedict Arnold, the famous ‘turncoat’ of the American Revolution was a Freemason. Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben was – like Lafayette – another foreigner and Freemason who ably assisted the American Revolutionaries. John Hancock, who is remembered often for his signature on the Declaration of Independence, was also a Mason. In fact, Masonic historian Steven C. Bullock wrote more than 300 pages on the influence of Freemasonry on Revolutionary America in his scholarly book Revolutionary Brotherhood. There can be little doubt, therefore, that Freemasonry was a prominent part of the lives of many of those responsible for the founding of the United States.
A Strange Tale
In his book The Secret Destiny of America, esoteric author Manly P. Hall recounts a bizarre piece of folklore regarding the creation of the American flag, and it bears retelling here. Hall says he first came across the strange tale in the 1890 book Our Flag, or the Evolution of the Stars and Stripes, authored by Robert Alan Campbell. It tells how the Continental Congress met in 1775 to discuss the creation of a Colonial flag; Benjamin Franklin and George Washington were just two of the luminaries present.
Campbell states that the flag committee met at a house in Cambridge, Massachusetts, near where General Washington was encamped. Staying at this house was an old gentleman – referred to only as the ‘Professor’ – and due to space constraints Benjamin Franklin offered to share apartments with the enigmatic man. Little is known about the Professor, except that he was at least 70 years old, and he “ate no flesh, fish, nor fowl, or any green things, and drank no liquor, wine, or ale”. He lived only on cereals, fruits and tea, and spent most of his time poring over ancient books and rare manuscripts.
When the Professor was introduced to the Continental Congress, Benjamin Franklin stepped forward and shook his hand. At this point, Campbell says, there was an obvious and mutual recognition between the two – perhaps indicative of a Masonic handshake or the like? In any case, after dinner Franklin exchanged a few words with Washington and the committee, and then made the curious move of asking the stranger to take part in the flag meeting.
On acceptance of the invitation, the Professor lost no time in asserting himself. He immediately recommended that the hostess be included as secretary of the committee, to increase the number of members from the inauspicious number of six to the more numerologically significant figure of seven – a suggestion that was unanimously accepted by the committee.
It was abundantly clear that this mysterious individual was well-grounded in numerology, as well as other ancient and mystical sciences such as astrology. Campbell quotes him as standing before the committee delivering this speech:
As the sun rises from his grave in Capricorn, mounts toward his resurrection in Aries and pass onward and upward to his glorious culmination in Cancer, so will our political sun rise and continue to increase in power, in light, and in glory; and the exalted sun of summer will not have gained his full strength of heat and power in the starry Lion until our Colonial Sun will be, in its glorious exaltation, demanding a place in the governmental firmaments alongside of, coordinate with, and in no wise subordinate to, any other sun of any other nation upon earth.
The Professor then recommended his design for the flag, which would allow for modification based on the upward rise of the United States. Campbell says that the committee approved this suggested design, and the flag was promptly adopted by George Washington as the standard for the Colonial Army.
Designing a Nation
Although it has often been claimed that up to 50 of the 56 signatories to the Declaration of Independence were Freemasons, the ‘official’ number is put at between 8 and 15. While this may seem to quash the conspiracy theories, it is still a significant number, especially so when one considers that such influential personalities as Franklin and Washington were long-time Masons. Despite the modern-day belief of many that the United States is a nation built from a strong Christian base, in truth a number of its founders were non-Christian and seem to have had a deep and abiding desire to create a new land where the tyrannies of religion and government – as seen in Europe – were largely kept in check.
Manly Hall’s The Secret Destiny of America claims that the creation of the United States was the prime goal of the ‘Order of the Quest’, a secret society composed of intellectuals and philosophers which had survived from ancient times. Hall says that the American Revolution was a step towards the ultimate aim of a worldwide democracy:
All these groups [Knights of the Holy Grail, Christian and Jewish Cabalists, Rosicrucians, the Illuminati] belong to what is called The Order of the Quest. All were searching for one and the same thing under a variety of rituals and symbols. That one thing was a perfected social order, Plato’s commonwealth, the government of the philosopher-king.
It must be said though, that this is not the view of orthodox historians. In actual fact, it is difficult to establish authoritatively whether or not secret societies guided colonial America towards a definite goal, or whether they only exercised an influence via the common philosophy shared by each of them – the ideal originally enunciated by Francis Bacon in The New Atlantis. No matter what the truth though, Freemasonry most definitely played some sort of role in the creation of the new republic. Masonic historian Ronald Heaton goes as far as to say that the Craft was more influential than any other institution in the establishment of the United States:
Neither general historians nor the members of the Fraternity since the days of the first Constitutional Conventions have realized how much the United States of America owes to Freemasonry, and how great a part it played in the birth of the nation and the establishment of the landmarks of that civilization.
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This article is a modified excerpt from The Guide to Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol, (check it out at Amazon US or Amazon UK), which explores many of the topics in Dan Brown’s sequel to The Da Vinci Code – including Francis Bacon, the Invisible College, and how Masonic thinking contributed to the founding of the United States of America and the construction of Washington, D.C.
An updated version of the book is also available for Kindle
